Komodo Breathes New Fire into IDE - page 2

Developers in Need

September 11, 2003

By
Rob Reilly

Compared to editors like Emacs and vi, Komodo provides a more 'modern' GUI-based environment, which layers high-productivity tools on top of a powerful core editing environment. For example, Komodo will underline syntactically incorrect code, so that you can fix the errors before you try to run the program.

"Compared to other integrated development environments (IDEs) like Visual Studio or Eclipse, we distinguish ourselves by trying to keep the visual clutter and complexity of the user interface to a minimum," Ascher explained. "Many of our customers aren't professional programmers and they like that the user interface is easy to approach."

Many developers recognize the fact that using a certain tool usually demands a lifelong commitment to that tool. But there can be steep learning curve for those tools. Komodo has leveled the learning mountain by being extremely flexible.

A major feature of Komodo is that it can adapt to a programmer's style and to the management techniques of the project. For example, you don't even have to arrange your functions into projects if you don't want to. You can chose not to retain inter-file relationships. A developer could even use Komodo in its most basic form, as a straight editor, if they wanted. The system's flexibility makes learning a little easier and gives the developer any level of sophistication that is needed.

Configuration is all weel and good, but for development tools, automation is the name of the game.

One such automation feature is the ability to run scripts and external programs from inside of Komodo, which is great for web development.

For example, say you are working on a remote web server and needed to restart Apache often to check your changes. You could set up a button on Komodo and every time you wanted to restart Apache you could just click the button. Komodo would go out to the remote server and restart the daemon. Although this is a very simple example, the capability is there to design fairly sophisticated custom automation functions within Komodo.

Komodo also has features that are fairly unique, such as the Toolbox, that lets people extend Komodo by calling out to other programs.

"It's not an original idea (it's at the core the philosophy of Unix/Linux tools like grep and awk), but I'm quite proud of the way we've integrated that notion into an IDE environment. We spend a lot of time and effort making sure that features were well presented to the users--too many tools have great features which no one can figure out how to use", Ascher said.

Features are great, but what about pricing?

"There are three ways to buy Komodo", Ascher said. Standard pricing of Komodo Professional is $295. Students and people using Komodo for home or education can get a Personal Edition for $29.95, but that version doesn't include some of the more professional features like the GUI builder, integration with source code control systems or the Visual Package Manager.

The ultimate, Komodo Professional is included in the ASPN Perl and ASPN Tcl subscription bundles. These go for $495 the first year and $295 every year thereafter. The subscription includes several other tools, various online books and other features. Also, Komodo is licensed to a developer and is not tied to a language, computer, or platform.

Komodo encompasses a comprehensive set of features that make a developer's life easier. It's no surprise that the name would be coined by someone that does development for a living.